Separation of church and state

Separation of church and state functions in E. L. Doctorow's City of God as both a constitutional given and a deeply contested theological and political question. The novel, whose very title invokes Augustine's City of God, repeatedly returns to the boundary between the sacred and the secular, asking whether ethical behavior can survive the removal of divine authority, and whether the modern democratic state can sustain itself without religious sanction. The principle appears not as a settled legal doctrine but as a living problem, tested by the actions of a priest who loses his faith, a rabbi who defends doubt as the true civilizer, and a city that seems to embody both the glory and the failure of secular modernity.

The Constitutional Principle and Its Limits

The novel's most explicit engagement with separation of church and state comes in Sarah Blumenthal's address to the Conference of American Studies in Religion in Washington, D.C. She observes that in advanced industrial democracies, ethical behavior is already codified with reference to no higher authority than civil law, and she raises the possibility that the Constitution not only separated church and state but adapted as the basis of civil law something of the best essence of religious tradition. This formulation suggests that the separation is not merely a negative prohibition against religious establishment but a positive transference of moral content from the sacred to the secular sphere. Sarah's question is whether the behavioral commandments of religion, its precipitate ethics or positive social values, can be maintained without reference to the authority of God. She recalls her undergraduate seminar in metaphysics at Harvard, where the professor insisted that there can be no ought, no categorical imperative in Kantian terms, no action from an irresistible conscience, without a supreme authority. Sarah does not accept this conclusion; she asks whether, after the exclusionary, the sacramental, the ritualistic, and simply fantastic elements of religion are abandoned, a universalist ethics can be maintained in its numinousness.

Doubt as the Civilizer

Sarah's address develops a striking thesis about the relationship between doubt and ethical behavior in the twentieth century. She argues that doubt, the constantly debated and flexible inner condition of theological uncertainty, the wish to believe in balance with rueful or nervous or grieving skepticism, seems to have held people in thrall to ethical behavior, while the true believers, of whatever stamp, religious or religious-statist, have done the murdering. The impulse to excommunicate, to satanize, to eradicate, to ethnically cleanse, she calls a religious impulse. In the practice and politics of religion, God has always been a license to kill. This is a direct challenge to the idea that religious conviction is the foundation of morality; instead, Sarah suggests, it is the suspension of firm conviction that produces ethical restraint. She trusts, among the doctrinaire religious, those who gravitate toward symbolic comfort rather than those who reaffirm historic guarantees, and she trusts the professional religious who are not in lockstep with their traditions' customs and practices, who are chafing under doctrinal pronouncements, or who are losing their congregations to charismatics and stadium-filling conversion performers. She compares the faithful who read Scripture with a willing suspension of disbelief to Coleridge's definition of reading poetry or fiction, and she insists that such believers must be true to themselves and understand that theirs is a compromised faith. Something more is required of them.

The Priest's Crisis and the Secular City

Thomas Pemberton's crisis of faith embodies the personal cost of the separation between the sacred and the secular. After leaving the priesthood, Pem reflects on his years of service, wondering what he could have been thinking during the solemn processions, the colors and collars and little charms, and he asks himself whether he was a broad-church Anglican or an animist. He picks up his old paperback Augustine, City of God, every page almost totally underlined, and he acknowledges that he is still attached to some of the words, even as he has left the institution that gave them meaning. Pem's wedding prayer, delivered as his final act as a Christian and an ex-Christian priest, directly confronts the problem of divine authority in a century of mass murder. He tells God that the relentless and unimaginable genocidal cruelties shuddering across the world have brought God into disrepute, and that the uninhibited degradation of the idea of life has thrown some into the despair of cursing God's name and impugning God's existence. He speaks of a risen suspicion among those clinging to a love of God that God is part of the problem, that men use God at will for their most hideous purposes, and that God does not seem to resist anyone who wants God for whatever foul, murderous reason. God, he says, is bought and embraced like the lowest, most pathetic streetwalker. This is the theological crisis that the separation of church and state both enables and fails to resolve: the state can keep religion out of government, but it cannot protect God from being used by those who claim divine sanction for violence.

The City of the Unremarked God

The novel's vision of the modern city is inseparable from its meditation on the separation of church and state. Pem describes the modern city as a great historically amassed communal creation, built from the ancestry of its inhabitants to construct consolidated institutions. Flying above it at night, it is a jeweled wonder of the universe, floating like a giant liner on the sea of darkness, smart, accomplished, sophisticated, and breathtakingly beautiful, glimmering and sparkling as all things breakable glimmer and sparkle. He wonders how much God had to do with this, how much of the splendor and insolence of the modern city creatively built from the disparate intentions of generations of men comes of the inspiration of God, because it is the city of the unremarked God, the sometime-thing God, the God of history. This is a vision of secular modernity as a space where God is present but unacknowledged, where the divine works through human institutions without being named. Yet the novel also imagines the collapse of this city, when the sustaining rituals of society break down, when the food supply becomes erratic, power blackouts come with greater frequency, the water arrives contaminated, the police forces are armed like soldiers, and inflation makes money useless. In this dystopian vision, prophets arise in their clerical robes to speak of evil and to announce that the wrath of God has come down on the city of unnatural pride, the earthly city, and the unremarked God is alive once again, resurrected in all His fury. The separation of church and state, the novel suggests, is what allows the city to function as a secular space, but it is also what makes the city vulnerable to those who would re-sacralize it for violent ends.

Transgression and the Limits of the Law

The novel's central plot device, the theft of the brass cross from St. Timothy's Episcopal Church and its appearance on the roof of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, tests the boundary between the sacred and the secular in concrete, physical terms. When Pem discovers the cross missing from behind the altar, he sees a shadow of the crucifix in the unfaded paint of his predecessor's poor taste, and he runs back into the church to let his little light shine. The detective he consults tells him that thieves will hit a synagogue for the Torah, because it is handwritten, not a mass-produced item, and will bring a minimum of five thousand dollars, whereas the book value of the cross is zilch, nada, nothing but scrap metal on the street. The detective, who is Catholic and goes to mass, calls the thieves a bunch of sickos. The cross's journey from the church to the synagogue roof is an act of religious transgression that violates the separation between Christian and Jewish sacred spaces, and it forces Pem to confront the meaning of the symbol he once served. The cross, an eight-foot hollow brass instrument, lies flat on the black tarred roof of the synagogue, its transverse exactly parallel to the front of the building, its upright pressed against the granite pediment, tarnished and shining in the autumn sun. Pem bends down for a closer look at the old nicks and dents, recognizing the object that once defined his vocation now displaced into an alien sacred space. The theft and its aftermath suggest that the separation of church and state, however legally secure, cannot contain the unruly movement of religious symbols and meanings across the boundaries it establishes.